Skyrim is running slow. I've got three monitors and have been using flawless widescreen which had been working well until the end of last winter when I took a break. Now trying to make it work and its just plain slow.Tried turning off mods, no luck.Tried limiting FPS, no luck.Cleaned up virtual memory, still nada.Cleaned dust out of machine.

Works well WITHOUT flawless widescreen, so thought i'd try widescreen fixer and same problem. Anyone else have this issue? Anyone know what to do?I cannot conceive playing with only one screen!

I wonder if it's because I'm using a newer driver than before or maybe the changes Bethesda made to the high resolution texture packs or maybe the game changes they've made since Apr 2012 or perhaps the mod changes since then.

A. While in the open world and inside of dungeons, the game runs very smoothly except when a new Cell is loaded. I am ok-ish with the Cell-loading stutter and this discussion is not about that.

B. While in Whiterun, loads between the insides of buildings and the regular town get longer and longer. Accompanying the longer load times, eventually, I will hear background sounds and even conversations while the screen is still black.

C. Also while in Whiterun, I eventually get stutters after loading into a zone when I turn. These can last from a fraction of a second to many (5 at most for me) seconds. Then, Skyrim seems to run normally until the next zone.

D. While playing Skyrim, my RAM usage for the program goes from ~1.15GB while in the outside world to upwards of 1.7GB after 45 minutes of activity inside Whiterun and its buildings.

E. If I close Skyrim while my character is inside of Whiterun, the game begins using ~1.25GB of RAM and runs very smoothly at first. But, after ~45 minutes, it gets up to 1,5-1.7GB of RAM and exhibits the symptoms in 1A, 1B, and 1C.

2. To try to resolve this long loading time, stutter problem in Whiterun, I did the following:

A. Turned off all mods, started skyrim, made a new game save, closed and restarted skyrim, turned on all mods, made another new game save. The only thing this did was break one of my mods.

B. Rolled back my video driver to the one I used in early 2012 when I first played Skyrim: Nvidia 301.42. Although my general performance seemed to improve by rolling back to this driver, it did not stop the long load times or stutters.

C. Uninstalled Sounds of Skyrim - Civilization and used SKSE's "ClearInvalidRegistrations" to try to remove save bloat. However, after three hours of combat, dungeon diving, zoning, and crafting, there was no positive change, and the command line kept saying that 0 items had been removed.

D. Turned off all of the mods I had installed except for Bethesda's high resolution texture mod, created a new character, and played till I got Breezehome. I then tested out that area without 3rd party mods. Eventually, I encountered the same symptoms as above. I did not uninstall Skyrim to do this step as I figured that uninstalling both of the sound mods (Civilization and Dungeons) and disabling the other ones would do the trick. But, I could have been wrong.

Well, Skyrim is a very Ram intensive game, 1.7GB ram usuage is pretty normal for me however I have 8GB total system RAM so it's no bother.

As for load times have you disabled CPU core parking? For me with core parking enable skyrim took a while to load and stuttered framrates regularly when I disabled core parking I noticed a considerable preformance increase in both load times and no longer had random framerate drops.

Unfortuantely, since his saves only had that version of Whiterun, I couldn't test the same version I had been testing with before, so that invalidates the test a bit.

(Edit - I discovered that the problem on my system was the Official High Resolution Pack. After disabling that, Skyrim ran very smoothly. Bethesda changed it when they added one of the expansions. It seems that more VRAM on the video card is required than the 1GB the Pack originally required.)